About Rose

Rose grew up in southern Ontario. Her parents, both biologists, gave her a free-ranging childhood, spent running in the woods, hiking and biking, and observing the natural world. She came up through the ranks of choirs and glee clubs with voice, cello and piano lessons. As a teen, she copied lyrics to musicals, wrote poetry and followed groundbreaking artists like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot.

After migrating to Nova Scotia in the 1970s, she worked as a potter, sculptor and textile artist, but soon began her own kids’ entertainment business as a professional storyteller and songwriter, facepainter and puppeteer, and eventually workshopping art projects in schools, until – at age 40 – music finally claimed her!

By the mid-‘80s Rose was already a prolific and respected innovative songwriter, performing solo at folk events, fronting several jazz bands, and singing in women’s folk quartette, Clearing by Noon. She performed in -and wrote for – various musical configurations with different backing guitarists, including Bill Plaskett (father of alt-rock artist Joel Plaskett) with whom she recorded her folk-jazz collection, Lilac Rain (1989).

In1990 she joined forces with Cathy Porter to develop new material on piano, launching the Rose Vaughan Trio’s music career. For two consecutive years, Rose garnered ECMA nominations for Female Singer of the Year (1993 & 1994), along with a SOCAN Song of the Year nomination for in 1994 for their popular Stone and Sand.

Rose has created an extensive catalogue of songs to date, numbering now into the hundreds, but many songs remain unrecorded.